Lady Henriette Summerset, apprentice of the Mages Guild, heir to the Duchy of Whitehill, and niece of the Queen of the Alliance, had been stuck serving her time on waystone duty for the entire long, hot afternoon.

  Students at the Bald Peak College of V?dic Grammar had been, since the school’s inception nineteen years before, obligated to take a least one shift a week waiting in the guard-house, available to provide their mana and activate the stone. While Ettie’s capacity of sixteen rings was rather impressive for her age - particularly for a student without a trace of Elden or V?dic blood - she would never be able to bear the entire load of the Bald Peak stone’s cost. Thankfully, the engraved disc was anchored to the mana stone veins running through the roots of the mountain, which channeled power from the rift directly to the ancient piece of V?dic magic. Ettie hardly ever needed to put more than half a dozen rings of her own mana into the effort when a merchant caravan or drovers’ herd approached for passage.

  It was usually rather light work, and like most students she knew, Ettie made a habit of bringing a satchel of books, quills, and at least one inkpot down whenever she was due to work a shift. For the entire winter, she’d actually rather enjoyed sitting by the crackling fire in the guard-house, where she could be certain of a moment of quiet, away from her room-mates. The guards left her alone while she worked. Ettie liked to think it was because she’d always been pleasant to them, but was self-aware enough to admit that it likely had a good deal to do with her family, as well.

  After all, while third in line for the throne behind her father and cousin wasn’t likely to ever mean much, given how long Auntie Liv was likely to survive, everyone in Alliance lands still did know who she was - even if they might not recognize Ettie’s face on sight.

  Once spring had passed into summer, however, and midsummer given way to late, an unseasonable heat had fallen upon the Aspen River Valley. For Henriette’s entire life, she’d loved mountain summers, and growing up she’d heard enough complaints from visitors who’d spent time in the south that she understood how remarkable the weather around Whitehill was.

  But this summer, according to the travellers that Ettie had accosted, it was easily as hot as a baking, grueling day under the sun at Coral Bay, in Lendh ka Dakruim, or in the jungles of Varuna. Everyone was soaked in sweat by the time it was none, which made the air in the guard-house reek of body odor. After getting a single whiff, Ettie had taken her things outside and up onto the stone wall that protected the waystone, where at least she could be in open air, and feel the occasional breeze tease her hair.

  Like every man she saw in the streets of Bald Peak, Ettie had forgone a doublet, and wore only a loose shirt of white linen over her breeches. She’d rolled her leather boots down as low as they could sit, and if she hadn’t had to walk over from the dormitory, she might have swapped them out entirely for a pair of sandals in the Dakruiman style.

  That was clearly what the other students had done.

  From her seat on a folding chair of canvas and wood, perched atop the wall, Ettie had a perfect view down from the bluff upon which the waystone rested to the banks of the River Aspen below. The spring rush of ice-melt had given way to lower water and a slower current, revealing stretches of sand and pebbled shore just beneath the steep banks. Dark, wet rocks were exposed even in the middle of the river, and Ettie’s fellow students clambered about them or sat with their bare feet in the water, stripped to the absolute minimum publicly acceptable amount of clothing. The boys had all stripped off their linen shirts, exposing freckled and pink shoulders to the sun. The young ladies, depending on their particular degree of self-consciousness or sense of propriety, either wore white shifts for bathing, or men’s trousers cut to the knee and a shirt, usually tied at the chest to expose their bellies.

  Dozens of them had descended upon the river, coming and going over the course of Ettie shift, dousing themselves in the cold mountain water while she was forced to suffer, baking like an overdone pie crust under the hot sun. It was difficult to do anything but hate the lot of them, as they laughed, splashed each other, and flirted.

  It was all made worse yet by the fact that Bheuv, the word of power which enhanced perception and the five senses, was the first that Ettie had ever imprinted. It came from her mother’s side of the family, and both Matthew and Beatrice Summerset, her parents, had agreed that it was safer to learn with than Ters, the word passed down by the old barons of Whitehill. Every V?dic word of power, in addition to being used for spellcraft, had a well-documented effect on the ability of a user to expand their perception of the world. In the case of Bheuv, even when the word wasn’t actively in use, Ettie noticed things that none of her friends did.

  While the effect was often quite useful, it was just as commonly a torment for her. Ettie was the first to smell if the meat in a market stall had gone off, or the milk was beginning to curdle. Every young man who doused himself in perfume when he didn’t have time to bathe before rushing into class was like a personal offense to her nose, and sometimes she wanted to bury her head in pillows when the barking of the city dogs woke her up in the middle of the night. She could even smell where the alley cats had marked their territory!

  As a result, the entire afternoon, while Ettie had tried to make some sort of progress on her work for Advanced Grammar and Spellcraft, with Archmagus Corbett, she’d been tormented by the shrieks of young women, only half-heartedly objecting, being dumped into the water; the laughter of young men at the jokes of their friends; the whooping and splashing, and every other noise that drifted, perfectly clear, up to her ears.

  She hated them all, and wanted nothing more than to be down there with them, immersed in the cold, rushing water, rather than stuck at the surface of whichever merchant just needed to get their preserved cuts of aged Aspen Valley steaks off to Courland or Freeport, Calder’s Landing or Soltheris.

  So it was that when Valo, a half-Elden second year student from Al’Fenthia, finally arrived to take her shift over, Ettie didn’t even wait for him to climb up the stairs to the top of the wall.

  “Finally!” Ettie groused. She’d packed all her study supplies away a quarter bell before he was due to come, and she slung her satchel over her shoulder, scampered down the stairs, and squeezed by him without so much as begging his pardon.

  He deserved it; his shift would cover sundown on into the evening, and the city was already beginning to cool off. The rusted jerk. Ettie knew that it wasn’t actually his fault she’d been roasting like a plucked chicken on a spit all afternoon, but it was difficult not to feel resentful.

  She half-ran down the stone steps which led from the bluff to the riverbank below. The wide, curving staircase hadn’t been in the original plans for the city, but by the third year of the college’s existence, summer bathing had been adopted as a pastime by the students, and Guild Mistress Every had struck a deal with the stoneworkers of House Isakki to create a swimming area that could handle not only the students, but the families and children of the city, as well.

  The Elden workers had done a tremendous job, Ettie had to admit, and the result was one of the few parts of Bald Peak that she clearly and unabashedly preferred to Whitehill. The entire bluff had been shored up with a series of steep stone terraces, providing grassy nooks where bathers could spread a blanket and sprawl out in the sun, each interconnected by narrow, short stairs. At the very foot of the bluff, the natural riverbank had been completely excavated on the city side of the Aspen, replaced with wide, curved and shallow stone steps which led directly down into the river for a length of perhaps fifty yards in either direction, before the natural banks returned. Past the steps, the river had been left unaltered, and the opposite bank remained just as hundreds of years of rain and flooding had made it.

  Ettie found herself an unclaimed patch of stone, threw her satchel of school supplies down, then sat so that she could yank her leather boots off. Once her stockings had followed, she balled them up and stuffed them into the tops of her boots. Finally, she stood up and had to do a bit of a dance, wiggling her hips to get her breeches down. When she was done, and wearing only her linen shirt, which hung down to mid-thigh, she made directly for the water, striding right down the stairs and then throwing herself in, turning as she slid through the water so that she ended up on her back, linen shirt billowing around her. She took a deep breath and dropped beneath the surface, letting the cold dark finally relieve an entire afternoon of misery.

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  When she came up, Ettie’s hair - blonde like her father’s - was slicked back, and she used her knuckles to rub water out of her eyes.

  “You’ve been waiting for this all day, haven’t you?”

  Ettie spun about in the water, to see Shooting Star wading toward her. “You could tell?” she asked.

  The first-year from Clear Water Cenote, in Varuna, grinned. Ettie wasn’t certain whether all of his people had those teeth that looked just a little too sharp, because she’d never yet crossed the ocean, but if Shooting Star and Commander Wren were anything to go by, she suspected so. His dark hair was soaked through, and Ettie caught a glimpse of a well-muscled, sun-tanned chest just beneath the surface of the water. While he couldn’t actually cast a spell, Shooting Star was already near the top of the Advanced Armed Combat course.

  “I could practically feel you rumbling like a stormcloud up there,” Shooting Star teased her. He was just a bit younger than her, and a lot of people assumed he’d been born to one of the Dreamers rescued from Godsgrave during the first year of the college’s operation, unless they did the math and realized that didn’t quite work out. In fact, Ettie knew, his parents had been among the first of the Great Bats to defect from the Lady of Blood’s forces and return to Clear Water Cenote.

  “That’s because this heat is miserable,” she told him, and splashed a bit of water at his face. “If you’d been stuck on waystone duty - which you don’t have to do, ever! - you’d have been miserable too.”

  “No, instead I spent the morning butchering mana beasts for the cellars,” Shooting Star pointed out. “The college gets their work out of us one way or the other, and since I was raised a hunter, they have me up to my elbows in oversized boar entrails.”

  Ettie laughed. “Alright, that might actually be worse,” she admitted. “I can’t imagine the stink. Here, give me your hand.”

  He held one out above the surface of the dark river, and she took an exaggerated sniff.

  “You gave them a pretty good wash, but you need to do better beneath your fingernails,” she told him.

  Shooting Star rolled his eyes. “No one else in the entire city would notice that.”

  “Not true!” Ettie objected. “Uncle Keri would, and any soldier who’s imprinted Bheuv.”

  “Ah yes, I forgot, your uncle the Prince Consort.” Shooting Star shook his head, but the smile didn’t leave his face. “I was going to head over to the Culler’s Rest for dinner. Would you like to come?”

  Ettie hesitated. There had been a lot - a lot - of male students, and not only first-years, who’d invited her to a great many dinners, market days, sleigh rides, and every other excuse to court that they could think of since she’d arrived at the campus in the autumn. It had become incredibly tiresome, even though she’d known it would be coming before she left Whitehill. Her mother had warned her to expect it, and even Aunt Liv had made it clear that there wasn’t really much of anything that could be done to put them all off without simply locking Ettie in a tower at the top of Bald Peak.

  “You’re going to be a duchess, one day,” the queen had said, putting it bluntly. “You’re the unwed daughter of the most powerful family in the Alliance. Unless you get married - or wring every drop of moisture out of the first boy who steps wrong - they’re going to bother you.”

  It was only after the first week of fending off suitors that Ettie had realized the idea of using Ters to deal with the problem hadn’t entirely been a joke on the part of her aunt. To his credit, however, Shooting Star hadn’t ever tried to trap her in some secluded, theoretically romantic location for a marriage proposal.

  “Alright,” Ettie said, after a moment’s thought. “That sounds nice. I could use a mug of cold ale, and I haven’t eaten anything since before my shift at the waystone. Head back up to the dorms to change?”

  “I was hoping you’d just dry us off,” the Red Shield said.

  “You’re lucky it's been a slow day at the waystone, or I wouldn’t have enough mana. Come on!” Ettie turned and pushed off with her feet against the sandy, pebbled bed of the river, and swam back toward the stairs.

  ?

  A quick spell later, and once again fully dressed, Ettie stepped past Shooting Star, who held the door open for her, into the common room of Bald Peak’s oldest inn - not that it was saying much. The Old Oak, in Whitehill, had served the wealthy elite of The Hill for hundreds of years, but The Culler’s Rest had only been built after the Battle of Ashford and the war against Lucania. Like everything in the young city, it was new.

  The rush of sound was nearly overwhelming to her, which was why Ettie often took her meals alone, or with only a small group of friends. Wine bottles clinked against wooden tables, the scent of ale, beer, stews and fried potatoes, bacon and garlic, rancid sweat and perfume hit her nose like a stone wall. She almost turned right around and left, but the proprietress, Joan Brewer, had somehow seen Ettie the moment she arrived, and had already approached and taken her by the elbow.

  “It’s a pleasure to have you tonight, m’lady,” Mistress Brewer said, with a broad smile. Eighteen years of running the inn - the last four without her husband - had left more gray in the woman’s hair then not, but she never seemed short of energy. “Let me take you over to a private room, so you’re out of the noise.”

  “Thank you,” Ettie told her. She tried not to look to either side as they made their way through the common room; meeting someone’s eyes was a good way to get trapped in a conversation. She could already hear the buzz of interest, and the murmuring of her name, from tables to either side of her passage.

  “-the duke’s daughter,” one voice rumbled. “I hear she’s got three words already. Think she’ll be a match for the queen one day?”

  The response was a scoff. “She’s got no Elden blood. Now the princess -”

  Ettie tried to shut out every conversation that shifted to center on her arrival, but with Bheuv humming in the back of her mind, it was difficult. The word of power seemed particularly active at the moment, for some reason, and she couldn’t for the life of her understand why. She certainly hadn’t made any effort to wake it up.

  Still, they were almost to the other side of the room, and Ettie could feel Shooting Star hovering close behind her back, as if to protect her. Good. Maybe if he glared at enough people, he could make up for putting her in this position. Ettie was just about certain they were going to make it out of the noise before she completely lost it and had to curl up in a ball when she heard the voice - low, not meant to carry.

  “-the Pyre Queen’s crossed the line this time.” The man was slurring his words, and Ettie knew immediately that he must be half drunk. She recognized one of her aunt’s less flattering nicknames - no one who knew what was good for them used it in polite society, but among those who objected to the Temple of the Trinity’s inquisitors threw it around when they thought no one was listening.

  Ettie slowed her steps to listen, and Shooting Star nearly ran into her back.

  “Aye,” a second man agreed. “If it isn’t bad enough we have to be ruled by those knife-earred fucks, she keeps telling the guilds to sod off, when they’re the only ones willing to stand up to the church!”

  “Well, she’ll get what’s coming to her,” the first voice came back, and the words sent a shard of ice right through Ettie’s belly. “Soon enough. Witch Queen, Queen of Scars, whatever you want to call her now - when she's dead, she can be the Queen of Ghosts!”

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  Dramatis Personae

  Henriette Summerset aka Ettie- Daughter of Matthew and Triss, niece of Liv and Keri, cousin of Rei and the princess. Heir to the Duchy of Whitehill. Apprentice of the Mages Guild. Most eligible bachelorette in the Alliance. [12 Rings of Mana]

  Joan Brewer - Proprietress of the Culler's Rest, and a refugee from the fall of Ashford. Does good business off college students.

  Mysterious Men - Clearly up to no good.

  Shooting Star - A hunter of the Red Shield Tribe. Totally trying to stealth date Ettie.